


Constancy

by Barkour



Category: Thor (Movies)
Genre: F/M, Gen, Thor: The Dark World
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-12-06
Updated: 2013-12-06
Packaged: 2018-01-03 14:55:44
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 11,017
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1071778
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Barkour/pseuds/Barkour
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sif struggles with whether or not to visit Asgard's most hated prisoner.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Constancy

**Author's Note:**

> This is a sort of fill in the blanks thing set after Loki's imprisonment on Asgard and before the main plot of TDW kicks in. Please be warned that this fic isn't very happy.
> 
> For those for whom this might be a concern: there is one scene in which a character vomits.
> 
> Thank you very, very much to Rawles for looking this over, correcting typos, pointing out places I forgot to finish up, and countering my doubts. Love you. <3

The terms of the traitor prince's imprisonment were no secret to those who wished to know; no secret, either, to those who'd no interest. His sins, too, those were known. Loki had made himself king before Thor through subterfuge and treason. At this, he had failed, stymied by the rightful heir; and so he had turned his wicked eye on Midgard, a meager holding, to be true, but what fight could such uncivilized things as lived on Midgard offer to one of the æsir with dreams of divinity? Still, he had failed in this as well, for Thor was well and truly the son of the Allfather, and as Odin had meted out justice did Thor do the same in the name of Asgard and of her king.

The only secret, then, was why Odin had spared Loki.

"He should have been better served with a blade," said Hallormr, whose shoulder was bandaged tightly. The beer hall knew no shortage of patrons or of voices raised; even so, his meaning carried through the noise.

Fandral laughed. His hand on the maid Unnr's ample hip fluttered. "Come, now, Hallormr," he said with easy smile, "this is no time for such serious talk. Are we not merry? Another victorious campaign!" 

At this, Volstagg lifted his tankard and said, "To Asgard!" and there was nothing to be done but to follow his example.

Sif knocked back perhaps more of her beer than she ought to have done in the one go, but it was no more bitter than any other night; and when Thor sat beside her at the long table, she smiled at him and tipped her head in greeting.

"You have not forgotten me, I trust?" he asked.

"Never!" said Volstagg. "Though we will have to call for a fresh round of drinks to see you served."

"And where have you been?" asked Sif of Thor, as Volstagg made good on his word. Fandral, reminded by Unnr of his promise to regale her with record of his exploits, of which there were many and each more absurd than the one before, had begun to tell of his mighty struggle with a mountain troll who'd designs on his head, and the audience he commanded made it simple to speak with Thor without an audience of her own.

Thor untucked his cape from beneath his thighs and gave a fleeting smile to the woman who brought him a tankard of beer and another for Sif. 

"I," he said, "have been in conference with Heimdall."

"Have you?" She rested her arms on the edge of the table and leaned forward against them. "Are you so worried for Álfheimr?"

They knew, the both of them, that it was not for the good of Álfheimr that he journeyed each evening to speak with Heimdall in his great observatory, there at the edge of the world. Nor was it out of conscience for the duty he owed to Asgard.

Thor drank from his tankard rather than speak, and he smiled a moment at Fandral's attempt to draw Hogun into a reenactment. He did not answer her.

"Thor," said Sif. She spoke lowly. "You do no favors to Asgard if your mind is elsewhere when she has need of you."

"Let us speak of happier things," said Thor, and he did look at her then, and there was some thing in the smile he offered to her, a thing she knew very well but had only of late seen in Thor, that gave her cause to hold her tongue when she would have pressed. He shifted as he turned his gaze to Fandral's show, and their shoulders nearly brushed but did not, and it was that distance she felt most powerfully; that, and after it, the absence of another. 

She set her jaw hard against the thought. She would not think of it. She would not allow it entrance. Her chest tightened.

"Was it not so?" cried Fandral, his arm cast about Hogun's shoulders.

"It was not so," said Hogun, and Fandral fell against him as Volstagg laughed and Thor laughed and the maid Unnr laughed and, so it seemed to her, everyone in the hall laughed but for Sif, who had not been listening.

"You tell it well," called Thor, "though you have forgotten how I saved you there at the end of it."

Fandral pushed Hogun from him -- Hogun's mouth had turned in a little smile, as much a laugh as Volstagg's shout -- and straightened his tailored shirt. "I can not recall that you were there."

"I was," said Thor, "and you're very lucky I was lest your miss be forced to carry a headless man around with her."

"My lady should not hear such things!"

"Oh, please," said Fandral's lady, her round shoulders rising, "I should hear many things you would rather I not."

Laughter took the crowd again, and Sif found she, too, shared in it. The knot in her breast eased some, as Fandral made his protests and Thor beside her cupped a hand to his mouth and shouted, "And what have you said to the lady?" almost as if everything were as it had ever been till it was no longer so.

Then Hallormr slapped his palm onto the table. The bandages pulled taut across his shoulder and his breast. His knuckles were white, perhaps with pain, perhaps with the force with which he now gripped the table's lip.

"Whose fault is all this?" he demanded. He looked them each in the eye, even Unnr, who was still smiling even as she pressed back against Fandral's chest, and then he turned again to Thor. "Whose?"

"Steady, young Hallormr," said Volstagg, nearest to him. "I think you may have had too much to drink."

Hallormr batted Volstagg's hands away, and he stood on his own with his shoulders, good and bad alike, squared.

"Your brother," he said very clearly to Thor, "should have died."

If Thor were not sat beside her, weighting the bench, the strength with which Sif shot up to her feet might have sent the bench skittering across the floor. Instead, it stayed in its place, hard against her calves, and she nearly unbalanced. It signified little but that this moment's unsteadiness steadied her temper, which had flared sudden and hot in her chest. She swallowed back her first impulse.

"You would do well to drink less," she said. "If you mean to take liberties with your prince."

"His brother took liberties first," said Hallormr. Drink did not give him an edge. The blow to his arm had done that. "Why do you think it is we're out there every day in the filth?"

"Because we are heroes," said Fandral lightly, but Hallormr would not be dissuaded now.

"All this for your brother," spat Hallormr. "Do you know how many--villages burned, because of him, because of damned Loki--"

Sif made to cross the table: she set her hand down on the edge and her heel came up to rest on the bench; in a single fluid motion she would be up; in another, she would be upon Hallormr. Thor touched her wrist with a finger.

Hallormr went on, heedless: "All the realms in turmoil, because of that wretched--"

"Hold your tongue," said Sif, "or I will hold it for you," meaning to rip it from his mouth.

"Do I speak false?" Hallormr spread his hands wide, or as widely as he might with one arm so stuck to his side. He looked around again, smiling as a stripped skull smiled, all teeth and no joy. "Do I lie, as Loki would? Was the Bifröst not broken?"

"Loki did not break the Bifröst," said Thor, in a voice tightly reined. "I did so."

"Because of Loki," said Hallormr. "Because of _him_. And now he sits pretty in a little cell while we are out there fixing the chaos he wrought, when he should be dead with his head cut off."

Thor could not stop her then. Thor would, if he were Thor still, be there before her. But it was Hogun who clasped Hallormr's shoulder and said, "Enough," and drew him away. 

Volstagg cleared his throat and, glancing to Thor, said, "I should--"

"Yes," said Fandral, rising as Unnr slid from him, "we should both go and make sure that Hogun does not frighten him too badly. Such a shame if he should lose that arm of his."

If there was a jest in this, it fell flat. Fandral murmured a hasty farewell to Unnr and bowed at the chest to Thor, and then he and Volstagg fell in step together.

Sif knuckled her hands against the table. Her wrists ached. At her side, still seated, Thor said nothing. He did nothing. A man across the room began laughing, a loud and tuneless thing that scratched at her ears. The maid Unnr sketched a little curtsy and said, "If it please you."

"Thank you for your friendship," said Thor to the maid, and he smiled at her much as he had smiled at Sif before.

Sif stepped over the bench. Her heel caught on it; she didn't slow. The crowd had thickened, the beer hall near to spilling over. She pushed for the door, not caring who she shoved out of her way and not caring in the slightest that no one said anything sharp in her ear about it.

The night was little better. News of the campaign's success had spread quickly, as quickly as news of Loki's imprisonment had spread the month before this, and there were some among those celebrating along the canal who recognized Sif and would congratulate her. She nodded, again, again, and smiled once, and then she simply averted her face away from them all as she forced on.

"Sif!"

"I'm surprised you would follow me," she said without turning to him.

Thor fell into step beside her. "Of course I would follow you."

She did turn on him then, without thinking of doing so. To his credit, he did not step back from her; but nor did he look ashamed or even cognizant of what he'd done, or not done.

"How could you let him say those things?" she demanded fiercely.

"Sif," said Thor, reaching for her arm.

She pulled from him. "Do not settle me!" Her mouth was dry. Her teeth ached to close on something. 

A man shouted to Thor from amongst the crowd, but Thor did not smile at him or bow his head. The night was dark. A soft, cool wind had come down the canal, and it chilled her face, her neck, her elbows, all of her that she'd left exposed to the night. The canal murmured little entreaties, but she was not weak to such natural magics. Thor looked down to her, and only then, with the night black behind him and the canal's rushing waters speaking to her, did she not recognize him.

She had pulled from his touch. Now she grasped his arm in her hand. She would not let her temper run from her. She had been its master these many years.

"How could you let him say those things?" she asked lowly. "How could you let him stand there and--" And wish Loki dead, she would have said, except she could not say it. Her tongue caught on her teeth. The ugly thing in her moved.

Did Thor see this? His arm had tensed beneath her hand.

"I cannot," he said, in as quiet a voice as her own. His eyelids lowered. She did not know him. She did not. When had Thor ever stood before her with his face set in such lines? When had she ever known him to let a man like Hallormr insult him so?

She said, "Why?"

His jaw worked. Her fingers bit into his sleeve.

"My father has only one son now," he said.

The water went on singing in its course. The sky over Asgard was dark, though the stars shone out of that darkness. The universe was as it had always been. It carried on. A strange and disconcerting impression of meaninglessness passed over her.

Sif swallowed this down. She pushed it from her. She let go of Thor's sleeve; she let go of his arm; she let go of him.

"You have changed," she said to Thor.

Thor laughed, only through his nose. There was no joy in it.

"Loki said something like that."

"I don't want to speak of Loki," said Sif.

Thor looked on her. As if it were what she wanted to hear from him, he said only, "He lives."

Sif turned from Thor. Her shoulders were straight. Her back was straight. She pushed many things from her; she would not bear them around her neck. Let the water take it from her. Let the universe swallow it. She did not care.

"It doesn't matter," she said coldly. "He is still gone, and here we're left to clean up his mess again."

She would have thought Thor to say something then to her; but he said nothing at all. Perhaps he thought of Midgard. Did she hold it against him? He had gone away and then he had come back changed, and Loki had changed and then gone; and it did not matter. It mattered to no one. The night pressed against her. She felt the cold deeply, down in her gut. There was something rising up in her that she did not want to know.

"If it please you," said Sif, and then she bowed her head and she left before the things she was pushing away pushed back.

*

The Allfather gave his ruling from the throne in closed room. Only the queen, if she chose, and those guards attached to the prisoner were to be granted admittance. Always, on the matter of treason, had it been handled thus. Not for Loki would it change.

"I thought you might be here."

Sif looked up from her exercises and swung her glaive, easily striking the target again even as she straightened to greet Thor. He came down the steps into the training yard, but he brought no weapon with him.

"Though you do know the yard is closed for the night," he said.

She brought her glaive up to her shoulder. "And who would stop me?"

"A fair point," said Thor. "And I did not think you would sit in your room, waiting."

She turned from him. The glaive came down into her hands again. She spun it between her palms, testing the grip.

"What am I meant to be waiting for?"

Loki would have laughed to hear so feeble a lie. Sif dug her heel into the dirt, stretched out her stance, and began again to work through the rudimentary exercises: strike. Strike again.

If Thor heard the lie, he did not speak of it. The sky called to him. He looked to it, as he had often done since his return the week before, and he said, without any other preamble,

"Loki will live."

The tip of her glaive dug into the target, piercing the wood through the rough padding. She turned her hand about on the grip and yanked hard, freeing it; then she brought the glaive around into the next form.

"The Allfather has grown merciful."

"Not mercy," said Thor quietly. The stars had lost their allure, briefly. He was watching Sif as she moved through every step of every form, as naturally as she breathed. Thought was not necessary for this, not any more.

"Or if mercy," he went on, "our mother's and not the king's."

"So the traitor lives," said Sif, and she drove her glaive savagely through the target. The wood at the base splintered. She stumbled, carried forward by its breaking, and caught herself against the long handle of her weapon. The rushing of her blood deafened her; the world contracted around her; then she shoved herself up and stood again.

"He will live," said Thor, "but in the dungeons, without quarter, for whatever remains of his life."

Sif rested the butt of her glaive in the dirt by her foot. A breath, then another: she drew it in and let it out, and still her blood drummed in her veins.

"Do you intend to visit him?" she asked, looking now to Thor; and as she looked to him, he looked away.

"He is to have no visitors," said Thor, but that was not what she had asked. 

The grip of her glaive was smooth against her skin, the metal made sleek over time with the movement of her hands. She twisted the grip and the blade retracted, and then she had nothing with which to fight. It was not that this that left her bare.

"I am sorry," said Sif quietly.

"As am I," said Thor, and then he breathed out and he turned to leave her.

She should have let him. This grief was his, after all, not hers. She spoke anyway.

"Why did you come to tell me this?"

Pausing at the top of the steps, he glanced back over his shoulder. The shadow residing in the covered balcony had come over him so that the lines of his face were all but lost to her; but the cant of his shoulders, that she could read. When, before, had she seen Thor with his shoulders bearing such weight? When had he ever looked at her so, as if across some immeasurable distance?

"Loki would have wanted it done," said Thor at last. "You were his friend as well."

What she might say to this, she could not think; she was silent as Thor took his leave of the yard, silent and stupidly so, like a lost child and not a warrior proven. Had she lost her tongue? Sweat, stinging, got into her eyes; she blinked it away. The sweat beneath her breasts and under her arms and at the small of her back: that she would not be rid of so easily. The look the broken target dummy offered her was dull, and it had nothing clever to say to her. Absurd, that this should have nettled her; but it wasn't the target's look that got up under her fingernails and dug in.

Crossing to it, she stooped and pulled the target's broken pole free of the mechanism that held it in place. This, she threw aside along with the dummy, and then she fetched another target to fix it into the mechanism. 

Loki would have wanted it done.

Sif released the blade; it extended again. She balanced her weight on her feet, well spread, and began cycling the glaive about her. Showy gestures, none she would ever bring to the battlefield, but the flashing of the blade calmed her now. Flipping her weapon, she swung it hard against the new target. Dust burst out from the padding. She turned quickly on her heel and brought the glaive to bear against the back of the dummy, driving forward so it swayed.

She emptied her mind. She emptied her heart. The glaive was a weight carried across the whole of her; she moved in service to it. The blade sang. Her heels scuffed the dirt, and the dummy groaned with each blow. Harder, she struck. No quarter. To hesitate was to fall in battle, and Sif would not fall. Strain knotted her arms. She shook the knots out and again, she struck out. And again. Again.

Night crept slowly upon her. The air cooled; the stars brightened; the burning in her muscles gave way to a building euphoria.

Relentless, she carried on. Only the glaive. Only the target set before her. Till the breath was short in her, she carried on--only the weapon she bore, only the target she lashed at. Nothing else remained. Nothing else mattered. Sweat slicked her throat so her hair stuck to her skin there. Her shoulders ached. Spinning on her toe with the glaive flipped from one hand to the other, she delivered a single, final blow: the glaive drove again into padding and then deep into wood. If it had been a man, he would have fallen to his knees before her, blood gushing from his throat as she jerked the glaive free again.

Her thighs trembled. Sif swallowed a breath and another. The glaive, planted in the dirt once more, held her. Her hair was stringy at her neck and thick in her eyes. She scratched it away, out of her eyes, away from her throat, her dry mouth. She had let her temper rule her.

Tipping her head back, she closed her eyes against the light of the stars, the breadth of the cosmos gazing down at her.

If Loki had died, she could have mourned him.

She retracted the blade and, alone in the yard with the emptiness inside her, Sif began to put her things away.

*

The campaigns continued: Múspellsheimr had moved to extend its hold on a number of small, independent worlds, and the work of beating the sons of Múspell back was tedious. Hyrrsandr, or Sun's Cradle as Múspell would have it, proved excessively so, as Múspellsheimr's forces had fallen back to regroup there, and so dwelt in greater number on a planet that was dry and unpleasant, naturally uninhabited except for a military outpost hardly fit to house the accumulated horde of Múspellsheimr. The days dragged on, as Asgard slowly worked nearer to the heart of the Múspell encampment.

"This would be faster going if the torches slept," grumbled Fandral late one night. He shook red silt from his boots. The thin soil had stained his stockings and his fine leather boots, and he was of an ill mood for this. Tossing one boot aside, he cast about for a sympathetic ear: "Does it seem fair that they should need so little sleep?"

Volstagg's snores gave no answer.

"Unfair," said Hogun from his work resharpening the blade of his axe, "it seems, that you talk so much."

Fandral slung his other boot to the ground. "If you have issue with me--"

"Be still," said Sif. She sat up on her cot and stared at the both of them, though Hogun still had not lifted his gaze from the whetstone with which he worked his axe.

"We are all of us over-tired. It's sleep you need, not bickering."

"I am overcome with dirt," said Fandral, and sorely did he need another boot to throw, though he'd none left to him. "If they want this rock so very much, let them have it."

"You know that we cannot," Sif fired back at him. "The Allfather has given us clear instruction. Would you have Asgard turn tail and let Múspellheimr use this as grounds to expand?"

Fandral's jaw tensed and eased again, and at last he looked away from her.

"I love Asgard as dearly as you," he muttered.

Hogun scraped the whetstone along the curve of the axe one last time. "No one loves Asgard as does Sif."

"Oh, shut up," said Sif. The jest was an old one, and she remembered too well from whose mouth it had first fallen.

"Sif, bride of Asgard," said Fandral. Of course this would cheer him.

Sif sighed and fell back upon her shapeless, useless pillow. "I will cut your tongue out."

"She teases," said Fandral, more confident than he should have been to say such a thing; but oh, she, too, was over-tired.

Hogun shrugged. "It's your tongue." He laid his axe out carefully upon the chest by his cot, and he bent to the lamp in his corner of the sloping tent and blew the light out. Little good it did, for the fires of Múspell would not be quenched by the hour, and throughout the night the distant flames illuminated the walls of their tent. Sif looked for shadows in the flickering lights, thinking as she did so of things she ought not, till at last she lapsed into a weak, dreaming sleep.

Múspell's line broke three days after, and the seige collapsed into mere violence, brutal and desperate. Victory was assured to Asgard, but the cost remained to be known, and with defeat near at hand, the smoking sons of Múspell turned wild.

The north wall of the fort, shaped like a caldera with a bowl at the middle and vast, jagged ramparts ringing it, spilled great gouts of smoke where Thor had shattered it. That was where Sif should have been, in that glorious first rush into the heart of Múspell's final stand, but like a fool, like a child, she had been struck down. Lucky to live, the healer who had tended to her head had said. What did that matter?

She had been there at the forefront, flanking Thor, when one of the vaunted First Sons of Múspell -- a creature like a tower of smoke forced into the shape of a man with fire spitting from eyes and mouth and the heated cracks in its shell, a being that dwarfed Thor, dwarfed even Sif's recollection of the great Destroyer of Asgard -- had flowed as a fire leaping over the edges of a ditch from the top of the wall. The earth turned to glass beneath his blistering weight.

Thor readied Mjolnir, but Sif clapped her hand to his shoulder and said, "You are needed more elsewhere. Leave this to me."

"You think you can take it?" He flashed a mocking smile at her. "Little Sif?"

"Go," she said, "or I will take you as well," and she pushed Thor from her.

"Your fight is with me!" she shouted up to the First Son. 

Something like an eye rolled across the smoldering expanse of his head, and he turned to her with all the unloving heat of a well-stoked wildfire. Sif twisted the grip of her glaive so that the second blade extended, and when the First Son spat fire at her, she was ready with her shield. 

Later, she would understand it was the frustration of the long and joyless month that had driven her to claim this challenge for herself. Then, she only knew that she wanted to run that fire through and see it guttering before her, as spent and wasted as so many other things. The fire broke against her shield, enchanted to give it strength and she used it as cover to get in near. Gripping her glaive lightly she swung it in a sickle arc so that both blades struck, first one then the other, cutting the right leg out from the First Son.

He staggered and she jogged backwards, holding her glaive at the ready as he fell to one knee and the soil began to smoke. Sif made to lower her arm and the shield she bore on it, but fire lashed at her again, and she brought her shield up; a mistake to have tried to look, to assess, as in that moment's stillness she had allowed him time to regain its feet. Smoke knotted the gash in his leg; the First Son stood over her.

In a voice like the cracking of a limb in fire, the First Son said, "You are unwanted, Asgardian," and his hand came down on her, crashing against her shield. She could not breathe for the smoke; she could not see for the watering of her eyes. The weight on her shield shifted, only so, and she lashed out accordingly and caught the First Son high in the thigh. The curve of the glaive bit deep into that strange, fleshy smoke; she pushed all her weight into it and then, gripping hard, she jerked the blade free.

Fire spilled like water from the wound; it dripped hot and pulsing to pool on the soil. She tasted something acrid in the air. The First Son reached for her and she slammed her shield against his arm, batting his touch away though the strength needed to do so made her shoulder ache with strain. Little use, that: he struck her with his left arm, and his fingers were uncountable, each of them searing through her armor.

"The Sun's Cradle belongs to Múspellheimr," he roared at her, his breath a pillar of smoke, "it has of old, and you are not wanted."

"Hold your tongue if you would keep it," Sif snarled. She slipped out of his grasp and turned, striking at the hand that came for her, at the second hand, the third. Smoke slithered out of his chest in fresh form.

The First Son laughed, harsh as fire spouting out of the cracking earth. 

"I have no tongue for you to cut."

As he spoke, the smoke in his face split; a snaking length of fire curled out of that maw, coiling to taunt and then driving fiercely at her. She rammed her shield at this mocking tongue and thought quickly: might she take it out as she had nearly done the Destroyer? Another fearsome blow knocked her back on her heels. She dug her feet in, seeking purchase in that forsaken loose soil. Her armor had seared where the First Son struck her; the plating had smeared oddly along her arm, the metal softened by his touch. If she were to leap upon its back -- and how she'd manage that, she didn't know, as the arena in which they fought was dearly lacking in monuments -- her feet would burn and then her legs and then the rest of her.

Another shower of blows forced her back again and again. Sif retreated some extra steps, putting distance between them. The soldiers surrounding them were wise enough not to cross paths; one man lunged away and onto the flaming spear of a lesser son of Múspell. She could not spare him aid. She'd barely aid enough for herself.

Sif parried another strike and turned her parry into a spin, slicing into that smokey gut, for all the good it did her. Another cut, just as swiftly given, and a third; all three began to close as the First Son grabbed a man up out of the horde and threw him at her. Sif dodged but only just and she lost her balance as she did so. She fell to her knee and scrabbled upright, but already he had covered the distance she'd made. How in all the realms was she to fight fire? 

The third gash sealed, smoke knitting together to fill the gap.

The weight of the glaive in her hand was familiar, intimately known. She spun it once about, gauging, and then she drew a deep breath of what air she could, and that still thick with smoke, and she brought her shield up before her face and she threw herself into the gambit. No time to think twice of it: she cut and cut again, up into the First Son's gut, up into his chest. Her shield made a splintering sound. Something heavy fell upon it -- his hand, perhaps -- and began to press, and her shoulder and her knees flared with pain as she locked them. Her arm weakened. She forced her shoulder to hold; she shoved up as hard as she might as the weight settled more fully on her.

If she died-- The thought pierced her. If she died, would Thor tell--

Cruelly, she drove forward, and she struggled to see around her shield even as the First Son began, at last, to grind her down. Her shoulder was near to buckling, her elbow close to break; then her arm did give, just a moment, and the shield smashed into her forehead before she could steady it. It broke on her brow; it cracked, and something sharp bit her arm.

And then, there it was, as she had thought: some small thing in the depths of all that smoke, like a log burning at the heart of a campfire. Sif fumbled to twist the grip of her glaive one-handed, then the second blade retracted and she pushed everything she had into the butt of the glaive, driving the skewering tip hard into that central hearth.

There was a noise like to that of a scream, then something like the air going out of a bag; and the smoke burst all about her. Her glaive drove into air, and Sif stumbled; she tripped; she collapsed, coughing, to the uncertain ground, on her knees and her forehead. She could not breathe or see or taste anything but that wave of smoke, freed of constraints. Her stomach clenched; she got no air; she retched and retched again. Her nose ran, her eyes too, and she passed her hand over her face, smearing rather than cleaning. Ash drifted across her fingers; it pooled around her knees. The harsh, sour taste of her vomit stung her mouth. Her gorge rose again; she set her teeth against it.

The smoke cleared, leaving the sun to stare hotly through the passing ash, a brilliant thing in all that haze. Furiously she blinked, trying to clear her eyes, and she dragged at her face again, wiping away the snot and the tears coming from her eyes, mixed with ash. She coughed again, hacking into the soil, and her arm ached as she tried to steady herself: a long, thick splinter from the cracked shield had stuck into her arm. That, she picked out and threw aside; and then she wiped her wet and filthy hand on the earth, and she sought only to breathe. 

The healer found her shortly after this. He was a thin man, tall, with hair slicked back from his face. He'd lost his helmet somewhere in the fray, she supposed. When he crouched beside her, she thought he was Loki.

"How many fingers am I holding up?" he asked her.

Sif blinked at him. Her vision blurred. His eyes were green and then they were brown. Her mouth still burned with the taste of vomit.

"Three," she said.

He grunted. His hands felt at her head, palpating her brow, her temples, the back of her skull. He had short fingers, not long, and his palms were too wide. She stared at his jawline. His drooping ear.

"Really," said Loki as he stroked his fingertips down her burnt nape, "your head's not as thick as you think it is."

Sif closed her eyes; they hurt her so. What a mess she must have looked to him, with her mouth wet and her nose dripping. She breathed out, shakily, and thought, she hadn't died after all. His thumb swept her temple, blooded and crusted with dirt. She had missed his teasing.

"Is that a compliment?" she murmured.

"Excuse me?" asked the healer.

She looked at him. He had sandy hair and dark eyes, and he was frowning rather severely.

Sif wrinkled her nose and squeezed her eyes shut, wishing Loki gone, wishing him _gone_ as he was meant to be.

"I'm sorry. What did you say?"

"I said, your head is hurt," he enunciated slowly. "I'd like to wrap it, and your arm, too."

The stink of smoke lingered. Hyrrsandr was dry and hot, anyway, and when she breathed in she breathed in that awful smoke but dirt, too, and the taste of over-cooked air. Loki would have hated it.

"Do it quickly," she said. "My lord Thor has need of me."

"Lady! Not in this state."

Sif opened her eyes and fixed him with a stare that would have made Loki smile for the challenge. The healer quieted and looked away.

"Quickly," she said again. 

He was quick enough.

*

"I hear you acquitted yourself well," said Frigga, after Sif had made her proper greetings. The queen gestured for Sif to choose a seat of her own, and Frigga took a place at her gleaming weaving table. Her hands shifted, roaming across the shining strands strung over the frame, and then she began manipulating the delicate lengths of light with the tips of her fingers.

"Not so well," said Sif. She sat lightly on the edge of the sofa nearest Frigga's dais.

The queen looked, amused, at her. "You are uncommonly humble today."

Sif flushed at this recollection of her child's pride, her youthful boasting. She was ever the child in Frigga's reckoning; she felt it, too.

"Well, I heard," said Frigga firmly, "and bravely besides. It isn't often that a First Son of Múspellsheimr is felled."

"I wouldn't allow Thor all the glory," said Sif. She rubbed her arm. The queen's gaze lighted on this motion.

"Did it hurt you dearly?"

The queen's eyes were soft, her mouth grave. The weaving shivered beneath her touch, her fingers working like the many legs of a spider as it spun and shaped its web.

"I'm of hardier stuff than--Thor," said Sif, only just replacing the first name that had come down her tongue. The jest was of old.

The queen was quiet; she considered her weaving, tending to that before all else. Sif rubbed again at her arm, though it hardly itched at all and certainly did not ache. The healers had taken care of the arm as well as they had the gash in her scalp and the burns that had lined her shoulder and the side of her head, and all she'd had to do was bite her tongue if their ministrations pained her.

"Holding your tongue?" Loki would have said. "How unlike you."

Sif shook her head, just slightly, to drive him out again.

A little clacking sounded: the queen twisted a dial at the top of the frame, and the consistency of the light with which she worked altered, the light darkening and thickening a quarter finger's width.

"The healers tended me well," Sif said. "I've no complaints. I would have brought you a prize, my queen, had I thought of it."

Frigga cascaded her fingers down the wefted light. "A prize! Oh, it's been a very long time since someone thought to bring me one of those."

"Does Thor not bring his mother gifts?" Sif smiled.

The queen lifted one hand just a moment, long enough to flutter the tips of her fingers at Sif. "He has so much to think of now. Where does he go at night, do you know?"

Sif swallowed the answer and turned her eyes down to her boots, flat upon the floor.

"That is his to tell you. If he will."

Frigga hummed, soft and short, but a note and nothing more. "My son stargazes of late. He was never my dreamer, and yet."

"He misses the lady Foster," said Sif. It was more than she had meant to tell, more than she ought.

"You're uneasy?" Frigga darted a look at Sif, up through the little tumble of curls pinned about her face.

Sif shook her head again, now for clearer purpose. "He is ... changed. Since Midgard."

"We are all changed," said Frigga. She smiled, and it was a little thing, tight on her mouth and tight in her brows. "Even the lady Sif has changed."

"Not me," Sif protested.

"Yes, you as well." Frigga's smile eased till it was gentler now and knowing still. "You might not see it, but I have eyes."

"And I do not?" Sif raised her chin. "I know myself, my queen."

Frigga laughed lowly. How quickly her fingers flicked, how neatly she wove the light into strange, new patterns, thus far known only to her hands and her eyes.

"True," said Frigga. "You have always known who you are, better than most." She slowed her hands and reached, with two fingers, to trace a shimmering cord. "I would that my sons had known themselves as well as the lady Sif knew herself." With her nail she plucked that cord so that it sang one long and lonely note, as sweet as the last few hours of summer.

The kindness of that single note reverberated in Sif; it trembled down her ribs as tidily as Frigga's fingers passed through her work. The weight of her own years filled Sif's throat. Who was she to question the queen? Who was she? Always, she had known this: Sif, daughter of Astra, Sif given to steel and to the battlefield, sworn to her liege Thor and the brotherhood of the soldier. She had taken the glaive for herself; she had chosen war over hearth and never regretted it. Still she did not regret this. She had never looked to a mirror and not recognized the lines of her mouth or the cant of her brow, or seen in her reflection things for which she had no name. Sif had ever been Sif, complete within herself.

"Grief is natural to all of us," Frigga said softly. Her eyes were steady, and when Sif met her regard, Frigga did not look away.

Sif tensed her jaw. "I have no cause for grief."

"You have cause enough," said Frigga. She plucked another shimmering note from her weaving, and then a third, lower, and her regard turned from Sif to her work again.

The air was thick, heavier now that the thing in Sif's chest was building. She rose from her seat and made to leave, taking two steps before she turned again on her heel. She picked at her fingers, pinching the calluses at the tips. Her hands were rough, toughened from years of swords and dirt and blood so there was no gentleness left to her, she thought sometimes, only the sting and song of battle remaining in her.

"I made a vow," said Sif, abruptly. She could not look at Frigga. Instead, she stared out the vast bank of gleaming windows that lined the wall behind the queen, where the day was nearly as bright as the queen's weaving.

"We've all made vows." The queen was patient, as ever. Her shoulders bent lightly to her work as she leaned into it. "But tell me, what did you swear?"

"I would never marry."

"Hm. Yes," said Frigga, and Sif turned, surprised. "I remember that."

"How could you know of it?"

Frigga laughed and said, wisely, "Odin sees much and Heimdall sees all, but I see the rest. Loki told me of it. He'd been teasing you and Thor terribly, and you swore to Loki you would never marry Thor, or anyone. And then, I believe, you hit him."

Sif knew she was blushing hotly, to think the queen had known of this. Loki had laughed and said, "What, never?" to Sif, as if it were a joke, and she hadn't been able to bear Loki laughing at her, too, not when her father laughed at her, not when everyone else laughed at her. Only Thor hadn't laughed at her when she'd sworn to carry a sword. Loki hadn't laughed. She hadn't mastered her temper then, and her fist had struck his shoulder hard enough to nearly knock him down. She'd never forgot how astonished he'd looked, as though he couldn't imagine what he'd said to make her so angry.

"He wasn't meant to tell you," she muttered.

Frigga pulled a string with her thumb, and it made a thin and sour sound.

"What mother does not know her son's secrets?"

Secrets! Sif gave up on the windows. She paced along the edge of the dais and worked her jaw, not caring to look to Frigga and to see in the queen's face what was in Sif.

"Loki had many secrets."

"And many still," said Frigga. "But why should a vow you made as a child trouble you now?" Then, pressing with a kindness that nearly masked the queen's incisive regard, she said, "Does Thor's stargazing trouble you?"

"Hardly," said Sif, though it did, but for another reason than the queen supposed. Why had it all changed? Why couldn't they have all gone as they had for years, season after season? She wished Thor had never taken them to Jötunheimr, that Loki had never wanted for the throne, that she were the person she had ever been. When she told Loki she would never marry, she had meant, I will never love, for she had seen what love had done to her mother, and she thought that was love did to everyone. Love had made Astra small, and Sif would never be small. She hadn't loved anyone, not in that way. 

I killed a First Son of Múspell, she thought; and yet how vast the universe seemed to her and how small was Sif.

Sif turned her face up to the queen. Frigga's hands were still on either side of the frame, and she was watching Sif.

"Do you visit him?" 

"The Allfather has ruled that Loki should see no one," said Frigga, "and I would never spite my husband's eye."

Sif tightened her lips. Her hands itched.

"But do you visit him?" she asked again.

Frigga returned to her weaving. "Odin sees much," she said, "and Heimdall sees all, but I see the rest."

"You defended him to the Allfather," said Sif. "You had him spared."

"Whatever he's done, he remains my son," said Frigga, twisting the light in her fingers, "and I love him always." She dragged a final, trembling note out of the light. When, at last, it faded, Sif had bowed and said, "My queen," and gone.

*

Hyrrsandr had given up some few prisoners to Asgard, of greatest import the Múspell general who had orchestrated the invasion of those worlds Múspellsheimr had turned its eye upon. He alone was sequestered in the deepest dungeon, while his fellow captive sons of Múspell were housed in cells of little consequence. It was punishment they wanted for in the dungeons of Asgard; it was information Asgard wanted for from this general.

Sif had missed the moment of his arrest; too busy emptying her guts into the dirt. The honor had gone instead to Hogun, who had characteristically refrained from boasting, though Fandral had been all too happy to boast for him. The general's capture was no more a secret than the mercy offered Loki. If the general were cooperative, he too might keep his head.

The guard posted at the steps leading down to that last dungeon knew Sif by face, by name, by the polished chestpiece she wore. This was what she had won for herself, that she should be known as the lady Sif, a warrior sworn to Asgard: her defense, her advancement, the ideals Asgard embodied and espoused.

"Lady Sif," he called her. His head inclined. "Why do you come here?"

"I come to see the Múspell general," she said, chin high, shoulders square. "I mean to speak with him."

"Interrogation is the Allfather's prerogative."

"Interrogation isn't my intent."

He was an older man, well-seasoned, no green recruit struck by her regard. Nevertheless he stood at ease before her, his shoulders bowing some as if in deference to her.

"What is your intent?" he asked.

Sif smiled, the easy, lean, thin-lipped smile that Loki had once compared to that of a wolf readying her teeth. 

"I would tell him what I've done," said Sif. Her chin rose higher still, so her throat showed as lean as that of a jungle cat stretching to roar or a wolf meaning to howl.

At this the guard smiled. "I have heard of your deeds. He will not be glad to know you put out a First Son."

"No," Sif replied. "He won't be."

The guard let her pass. She did not look back, nor did she look from side to side or hasten her stride. Sif walked with purpose, as naturally as ever she walked, so that the echo of each step sounded in a steady rhythm. The dungeons were clean and dark, laid out neatly with square cells, austere and bare of comfort. One cell had a chairs, a low table, a short sofa, and a shelf for books. The chair was occupied by Loki, and Loki was occupied with a book. She passed his cell without turning her head or even her eye. There was a faint sound as she walked by, as of a paper pinched; then she was out of sight of it.

She had meant to speak with the general. Truly, she had meant this, though it was to cover her tracks should the guard mention her visit to someone and they in turn mention it to the general. That was something Loki had tried to teach her once, that she must think like the hunter whenever she made to lie, but Sif had laughed and said, "I'll leave the lies to you." She'd never been good at covering her tracks like that. Hadn't Loki known when she'd gone with the Warriors Three to Midgard in search of Thor? How poorly she must have hid the challenge in her smile when she bowed and left him in the throne room, Loki with the crown he'd so coveted.

She got to the corner; she turned it. The next bank of cells stretched on before her. Light imprisoned; it cast glimmering gold trails across the sleek stone floor. All of it was quiet, only silence waiting for her there at the next turn at the end of the row. Her heart beat steadily. The soft susurration of her breath deafened. She took a step forward. Her heel settled firmly on the stone. A man in the third cell to the left stirred. Her heel scraped stone as she turned on it.

Loki had closed his book. He'd rested it on his thigh, with his hand over top of it and his little finger closed in the book, to mark the page. Politely, he waited for her.

Sif took two steps up but not the third, so that a distance remained between them along with that gold wall that kept him so trapped. He watched her do so, not keenly but with a languid cast to his eyes, his eyelashes low, and his hands relaxed, the one at his thigh and the other at the low table by the chair. Loki smiled genially at her.

"Forgive me for not having the table set," he said. "I wasn't expecting company."

Her jaw clenched. She bit it all down. Her lips tightened, and she wished for her glaive, not to strike him -- a joke, that, with that cell protecting him as much as it held him captive -- but for the comfort of its weight.

"I haven't come to sup with you," she said. The words were thick in her mouth. They weren't at all what she'd thought of saying so many nights.

"I haven't much to offer." He turned his palm up and gestured to his cell, so very spacious and so very empty even with what amenities had been allowed him. "As you can see. I'm very low on stores at the moment. It's all the visitors I have." He tipped his head lightly to the side. His hair was long, longer than she'd ever seen it, and it fell against his throat. "But then, I don't believe I'm supposed to have company. Are you being naughty, Sif? Does the poor guard know you're here? How unlike you, misusing someone's faith."

"As if you're one to talk," said Sif.

"Ah," said Loki. He leaned back in the chair. His eyes lidded, and his eyebrow canted. The guise of boredom was familiar on his face. "So you've come to moralize."

What had she come for? Now that she was here, she found everything she'd thought of, all the lines she'd considered, were nothing; how little any of it meant.

"The Allfather should have killed you," she said.

Loki smiled again, so it ate up his face. She'd never seen that smile before. His teeth showed when he did it.

"Oh, you must have been disappointed. Righteous Lady Sif." He shifted, turning about in the chair so that his knees pointed to her. He leaned forward. "Tell me, did you weep when Thor told you the wise Allfather had spared me my head?"

Sif shook her head, though she did not mean it to answer his question. "What has happened to you, Loki?"

How small that came out. How honest. She'd thought to cut with it, to drive it into him. Instead, it came out far too sincere. There was something weak in her throat and she could not get it out.

"You must have heard the stories," said Loki, with a pitying look. "Surely Thor hasn't thrown you out of his confidence, only because of that Midgard girl."

Sif curled her lips. "I would hear it from you."

"How so?"

"Truthfully," she said, "without any of your lies. I knew you once. I fought alongside you. You owe me honesty at least."

"Oh, Sif," said Loki. The smile had gone out of his face. The pity had, too. "When have I ever given you honesty?"

"Once, you did," said Sif. "When we were friends."

His mouth twisted. "That was a lie, too. Couldn't you tell?"

Her heart was still steady; it neither skipped nor quickened. A strange calmness had come over her. She'd known it before, often, though rarely outside of battle. Sif looked at Loki, still seated in his one chair with the book in his lap and his elbow rested on that simple table. He wore the same outfit she'd last seen him in, the year before. If she'd so wanted, she could have imagined that year gone; but his hair was too long, and she herself had changed too much. She looked at him, still. She saw him.

"I always knew when you lied," Sif said.

He'd set his little finger in the book so she'd think he cared little for her conversation. That was an old trick, one she'd ferreted out years ago when they were both of them young. His hands were relaxed. His eyes were lidded; he was careless, spiteful, disinterested. A muscle in his throat had tightened at that last thing she'd said. She saw how it stood out, and then, as Loki put the book down on the table, how that muscle eased.

"I always lied," he said, his fingertips lingering on the book's unbroken spine.

"Did you lie when you fought beside Thor?" she demanded. "Did you lie when we brought glory to Asgard? When we would have given our lives for her?"

"What should I care for the glory of Asgard?" asked Loki sharply. The coldness of it pricked her. He looked again at her and his eyes were no longer sleepy, his mouth no longer easy. Everything about him had come to a point. "What glory is there in sacrificing yourself for a house as empty as Asgard?"

"You won't distract me," she warned.

"And what am I meant to distract you from?" 

He considered her. Her nape goosebumped uncomfortably. She felt his gaze in the weight of her arms, straight at her sides, and she fisted her hand against it. From what did he distract her? Her tongue was stupid. All of her was stupid. She wished the field were not there so she could scoop his throat in her hands.

"You betrayed us," she said. It was a blade as sharp as any he voiced. "You turned your back on all of Asgard."

"Asgard turned its back on me well before that," said Loki, but she allowed him no breath.

"Did you want it so badly?" 

She hated how her voice had softened; she hated how her heart quickened. The dungeons were so cold about her. Goose pimples ran down her arms, too. The tendons in her wrist pulled too tight; her fisted fingers dug into her palm.

"Did it mean so little to you?"

Loki laughed, unkindly. He looked away, to his hand flattened against his thigh. "I should know better than anyone," he said, and he gazed up at her through his brittle eyelashes. "Anything built on a lie is itself a lie. They told you, didn't they? What I am."

"You're Loki," she said, though she knew the truth he meant.

"A jötunn," he said. "Of Jötunheimr." His lips curled. His teeth flashed. He spat it out, rounded on his tongue like cold marbles: "Son of _Laufey_."

Sif saw him, Loki, sitting there with his face thin and cruel and his mouth a hard line like a knife slipped from its sheath. I shouldn't have come, she thought. His face was the face of a stranger. How many times had she looked on him? How well did she know the bones in his face, the line of his throat, how he held a book in his hands? He looked at her as if she were a bug in a glass.

"And do you think that makes your actions just?"

"I only did what was in the best interests of Asgard," said Loki.

"Asgard!" Sif turned from him. Her jaw pained her; she bit hard. "What do you care for Asgard?"

He scoffed. "What do you care for Jötunheimr? If every last jötunn lay dead at your feet, would you mourn for them?"

It whispered at her: When had she ever so much as looked on a jötunn without meaning to take a knife to his throat?

"Would you have mourned them?" she asked of him.

He smiled mockingly at her. "Am I not a proper son of Asgard?"

Her heart was pulling at her chest. Her nails bit the flesh of her palm. He had always been better than she at wits, and she his better at swords. She had no sword. She had no glaive. He had, in his aspect, in the shape of his jaw where it met with his throat, the ghost of the man with whom she had once walked, laughing, onto a field of certain death and emerged again still living. Still laughing.

"A proper son of Asgard would not have stolen the throne," she said up to this stranger, this lean and cold man with those eyes she knew so very well. "A proper son of Asgard would not have made himself a god."

"And what is Midgard if not a flock to be tended?" he asked, scornful. "They're weak, and small, and they need strength to protect them so they can live their silly, short lives."

Sif laughed. She could not help it. 

"And are you the one to do it?" She looked again at him and she wanted to wound him, Loki who looked at her as if he had never once cared for her. "Loki, the world-killer. Do you decide who lives and dies?"

His eyes were so green. They'd ever been so. Green as shadows in the forest in his pale face. Softly he said, "No. That was your domain, wasn't it."

She couldn't understand him. How much had she ever understood? 

"Stop your games," she said. Her throat throbbed, the flesh in her raw not with use, but feeling, rather, an awful and hideous wave of it starting low in her belly. "I didn't come here to hear your tricks."

"What did you come here for, then?" asked Loki. He looked, terribly, at her, through the glimmering field that separated them and across the year of his absence. His chin rose. He smiled slickly at her. "Did you expect me to fall to my knees? To say how sorry I am? To beg for your forgiveness?" He said it mockingly, a jest in his mouth and a blade in her ears.

She met his gaze, as she had always met his gaze, as she had always met every challenge made to her, and she did this without flinching though she could see no prize at the end of it for her.

"I came to see you."

The admission fell like a stone onto thick earth, with little effect on anything. His face did not change, but for how the lashes at his left eye fluttered a moment. Had Sif not made such a game of studying his changing face so long ago, perhaps she would not have caught that single half-movement; he stilled it swiftly enough. With great purpose, Loki lifted both his hands and turned them over so his palms faced, in supplication, the low ceiling and his fingertips curled away from her. He tipped his head to one side again, and his hair fell across his cheek and his throat. His shoulders were loose, his smile only half a thing.

"And are you pleased with what you see?"

"You've changed," she said instead.

He laughed and looked away to the wall, as if for an audience to share in his sudden amusement. 

"Did you expect me to stay the same?"

"Why," she asked, and it sounded so very loudly in the silence and the crushing emptiness of the dungeons: "Why did you go away?"

He was smiling, still. He was strange, still.

"Who would have wanted me to stay?"

"We were your friends," she said. 

Loki tipped his head the other way. His eyes narrowed. 

"You betrayed me," he said. "When I was king."

"You betrayed Thor," she said. "When you were king. Did you plan it all, from the start? For Thor to be cast out?" That was when it had started; that was when it had all begun slowly, then faster and faster, to change.

Loki settled back in his chair. Boredom lidded his eyes. Was this true or was it false? She supposed in the end he was right; it didn't matter. Everything had changed, after all.

"Believe what you will," he said. What did that matter, either? Falsehood, truthtold. 

Her shoulders were heavy with the armor she wore, the thick, polished chestplate that gleamed even in the darkest corners, the gauntlets that closed stoutly around her forearms and then opened loosely around her wrists so that she might strike with ease and all mobility. She'd grown accustomed to this weight long ago. Across from her Loki was dressed as he'd always dressed in silk and light armor, as the cold wind from the north needed no heavy chestplate and no glaive to run and cut.

"I only ever wanted the truth from you," she said.

He'd his own weights. Remotely, he said, "When have I ever lied to you?" and his fingers picked at the book where he'd set it aside. He wanted something from her, but she didn't know what she had to give him.

She shook her head. Her scalp crawled. 

"You were always lying to me."

"The truth," he said. His eyes flickered down; he considered her and then he looked away, finally, and he did not regard her again. Loki reached for his book. "The truth is," he said as he opened the little book and began slipping his fingers through the pages, "you've wasted your time. You'd be better off sticking to Thor's side."

She watched him find his place again in that little book, given to him, she thought, by Frigga, who had ever loved her son. Something thick and bitter filled Sif's throat. She thought perhaps it was grief.

"You would have slain me," she said, "on Midgard with the Destroyer."

He'd no answer for this. His face was turned down to the page on which he'd settled, but his eyes did not move, and the fingers cradling the back of the book tightened only so.

Sif straightened her back. She tipped her chin up. She was a warrior, always. She'd her armor, and she'd her arms; what could she suffer that she had not already suffered?

"You were my friend once," she said at last. "That's why I came to see you."

His thumb traced the edge of the page. The paper was thin and yellowed beneath his thumb.

"You were Thor's friend, bride of Asgard," he said to the book. "Not mine."

"You were always my friend," said Sif, for what else could she say? I vowed never to marry, she thought. I should not have come. Why did you go? Why did you come back? All the things spinning inside her had gone quiet and then run out. Her armor bore her down, but it wasn't this that made her so weary.

Loki turned the page. Without looking to her, he said, "The guard will be down soon. Unless, of course, you want to be caught."

What could she say? Her throat ached with her own silence. She made to leave. In the corner of her eye she saw how Loki bowed his head to the book in his lap. Her feet were rooted.

"I would have mourned you," Sif said. She could not bring herself to say the other thing, still waiting in her. 

"You would have been a fool," said Loki.

"I was a fool," she said. She looked over her shoulder at Loki, the second prince, the traitor king, prisoner of Asgard, Asgard to whom she was sworn above all else. She thought of Asgard then, when she said, "You would have burned Asgard down out of envy."

He did lift his eyes at this.

"Was that when I lost your love?" he asked, lightly as though this too were a joke; but his eyes were dark and he would not blink.

"I made a vow once," she said to him, to Loki in his lonely cell. She would have done more than mourned him. She could not allow the thought of it. Sif hardened her heart, her gaze, her tongue. "And I do not break my vows."

He smiled and it nearly reached his eyes.

"That was always what I liked best about you," he said to her, to Sif in her gleaming armor. "Your unfailing honesty." Perhaps he meant it.

She said nothing else; neither did he. Sif left, her steps as even and as sure as when she had first walked to meet him. That was the first she went down to the dungeons to see Loki. That was the last.


End file.
